It Is Not Just The Houses

Yesterday I attended a conference for those who work in community ministry projects in the inner city parts of London. Titled 'A Passion for the City,' the conference took place at the church of Basil Jellicoe (BFr 1912), S Mary's Somers Town. The work and example of Fr Jellicoe was very often adduced by all the participants as we considered how we work in the inner city today.

Jellicoe insisted the new flats in Somers Town should have community spaces where neighbours could meet and talk, and public art. These coloumns are for clothes lines. These principls inform puplic housing design to this day. 

There are many themes. Internally, the focus on the inner city and its needs which was so much part of the life of the church in the 1980s in the wake of the Faith in the City report, has somewhat waned. The Bishop of Stepney reflected on the reasons for this and what we should be doing about it.

Fr Caster and the tour of the S Pancras Housing Association blocks materminded by Jellicoe

One of the fruits of that report was the Church Urban Fund, which is 25 this year, moving to renew its grant making capability and continuing to work to provide start up funding for innumerable community projects run from and by our churches. Tim Bissett, Cheif Executive of CUF was there.

The Diocese of London, whose churches are growing in attendance and in number has over 700 community projects running in our 400 parishes. Jellicoe recognised the pressing urgent need to do something about the physical condition of his parishioners who lived in some of the worst slums of the day. But he would say 'it is not just the houses.' The physical needs were only a part of the needs of the whole person and Jellicoe was at least if not more concerned with souls. The Bishop of London preached at the Mass in the middle of the day, celebrated where Fr Jellicoe himself  brought the physical and spiritual needs of his people together in the simple meal in which body and soul are fed.

The Magdalene Club at S Mary's, home of a drop-in lunch club replaing a provision which has been cut by the local authority. Fr Jellicoe's portrait looks on

Over lunch there were walking tours in which Fr John Caster, Fr Jellicoe's successor as priest in charge of S Mary's showed us the results of the work of slum clearance by his predecessor.

Today government is taking the church seriously as a partner, but the 'Big Society' is, no more than any other political system, entirely without challenge for the church or subject to questions from us. Jellicoe looked to the building of the New Jerusalem, and that is not, ultimately, a Kingdom of this world, though it requires us to work to make this world a better reflection of the Kingdom of God. A panel in the afternoon helped us to reflect on the Government's agenda and our response to it. Chaired by Fran Beckett OBE, it featured Paul Goodman of Conservative Home, Francis Davis fellow of Blackfriars in Oxford, The Rev'd Dr James Walters , chaplain of the LSE, and the Bishop of Stepney.